the end
by thir13enth
Summary: She comes from a family of authors—and little does she know how much she'd regret how her ancestors wrote her story. Character death. Nalu. Implied Annalogia.
**notes:** This is sorta kind of a partner piece to my other story **400**. The other story will give you some context, but this can easily be read individually.

Yes, character death. Yes, angst galore. Welcome to my world.

* * *

When Lucy sees Natsu fall to the ground, all she sees is red like the blood that gathers around his growing cold body.

Something snaps inside her chest and she wails—louder the sound of her crushed spirit—before she feels herself grow and grow in so much hatred that when she finally opens her eyes, she suddenly finds herself towering over the Black Dragon, cursing the arrogant smile on the wretched man's lips for having finished off the last Dragon Slayer.

She spews rage and vengeance through her lips unlike her characteristic honey sweet amber words. Her fingers curl into claws, tendons tense with a lust to kill. She evolves into something she has never become, she is overwhelmed by emotions she's never felt before; yet it feels as familiar as just several days ago when she broke ties with Aquarius to call upon the Celestial King and then she understands—

 _Ah, the key to my heart has been broken._

She's never handled such raw power before, and when she finally opens her eyes, the faces of her nakama, worried sick, are surround her.

"It's over. It's all over," they repeat to her, against the tension of blood-heavy air saturated with the stench of a 400-years-too-old man.

Her eyes skip over the defeated enemy to her defeated love.

"Yeah," she agrees. "Everything's over."

 **…**

The next time Lucy opens her eyes, she is sitting in a sofa much too large and much too comfortable for her. She's in a small silent room that she's been in many many times before and she's facing a woman that she has still not learned the name of.

"Did you eat breakfast, Lucy?"

Lucy nods, thinks of the bland porridge that she swallowed obediently this morning.

"Did you have fun with your friends yesterday?"

Lucy tells her yes, but she doesn't mention that she didn't smile once while her nakama took her out on a picnic that sunny day, and she doesn't mention that everything she was coaxed to eat tasted like ash.

"And you'll continue writing, right, Lucy? I think that we've seen a lot of progress in your mood stability since you started writing again. You used to love to write, didn't you?"

Lucy tilts her head up, counts the worried wrinkles on the other woman's forehead.

"I think you're ready, Lucy."

Lucy nods. Her lips are as silent as ever.

She doesn't remember when she began walking but suddenly she's standing in front of her desk.

There's an unopened letter sitting on it. It's been sitting there since she received it two years ago in the mail from a messenger that she doesn't remember the name of.

She did hear what he had to say however—that the letter is her mother's parting gift to her, one that has been passed down from Heartfilia to Heartfilia, one that she is supposed to open when the time feels right.

The time has been right for two years now.

But Lucy will not crack the wax seal. How can the time be right when everything in the world feels so wrong?

Lucy will not read the letter. She knows its contents anyway—an apology from Anna—but she will not forgive the blood on her hands for some few parting words from a woman that gave all the women of her bloodline the heaviest weights to shoulder.

All Lucy can think is screw Anna for pushing problems of the past 400 years into the future.

Screw Anna for letting generations of daughters below her carry the ever-growing burden of the celestial gate, adding pounds and pounds of heartache and responsibility around their wrist—handcuffs holding them back and forcing them to give a set of keys to their daughter—who would bear the same shade of accursed golden hair.

Screw Anna for making her mother open the door, suffer the blame for unleashing power unheard of for centuries back into the world and restarting a cycle of killing and bloodshed, give up her own life to follow through with selfish decisions from the past—yet sigh in relief that it was she, not her young daughter or her future granddaughters, that broke the jinx of twelve heirlooms.

And screw Anna for sparing the love of her life in exchange for the love of _her_ life.

Lucy has cried many times before when thinking of the letter, but at this point, her eyes are so dry that she barely blinks at the sight of it.

Instead, she picks up the pages of her half-finished novel, a product of years and years of tear-filled nights. Although she hasn't eaten anything much in the last two years since he is gone, she has still toiled over her desk—back hunched over, hands smudged in ink, calluses forming over her third finger.

She is writing her story of Fairy Tail. According to the woman in the small room with the big comfy sofa, the writing has helped her, which she guesses is why she continues.

She reads the last few lines she wrote:

 _"You can do this, Natsu!" she exclaimed, calling out to him from across the battlefield._

 _"I promise I'll win!" he agreed._

 _She was worried but she knew deep in her heart that he was going to do exactly as he promised._

 _He always did. After all, he—_

She's been stuck on it for the past day and a half. She doesn't know what come after.

She flips over the page and looks at its vast emptiness, only the ridges from hard pressured writing on the opposite side scattered over the clean surface.

She stares at it for another moment before a growing thought begins to echo in her head again. She tries to ignore the thought but it keeps resurfacing, just like it does every night and keeps her from falling fast asleep—

 _What are you trying to do? Rewrite the future?_

Lucy has always thought that she controlled her life—that's why she left home, why she sought to join a guild, why she rented her own apartment, why she wrote her own characters in her own damn book—but it's when she picks up her pen that she reminds herself that she didn't have a choice at all in what had happened to her.

She didn't _choose_ to lose him. He was hers to lose from the very start.

She tries to continue writing, reminds herself where she has left her story to be continued, but eventually she throws down her pen, realizes that there is no future to write on the tear-dried paper, and wishes her mind is as blank as the white page staring back at her.

* * *

 **thir13enth**


End file.
